If, however the (as you wrote) "best you've got" is the Josephus account, then I will recommend in kind that you raise your standards for evidence.
Your points are well taken, but the real intent was my final paragraph. If somebody were to pop up with Jesus' driver's license, it would prove... what, exactly? That there was some guy named Yeshua two thousand or so years ago. Unless it lists "Moshiach" as his occupation, I shrug (and even then it doesn't mean much except that he had the same sense of humor as I do when I use whitehouse.gov as my email address on forms I don't like.)
I'm inclined to take a generous view of the evidence simply because it ultimately doesn't point anywhere. The tricky parts of the historical account aren't with his existence but with his resurrection, his other miracles, and his position as savior. Compared to the evidence for those things, the blitherings of Joshephus and Tacticus are clues as solid as any Encyclopedia Brown could hope for.
Conclusive proof? I haven't got any. It was a long time ago and records of nearly everything were spotty. There are a lot of far more recent events which are largely conjecture. Looking for one guy two thousand years ago is going to be tricky.
However, there are various bits of reasonably contemporaneous evidence. The best one I know of is the Roman historian Josephus, who makes various passing references. He wasn't quite contemporaneous; he was born after the nominal execution of Jesus. He's not known for making stuff up, though his primary witness could have been pulling his leg. Later than that, Tacticus referred to Jesus. Do a Google search and you'll find it.
That just proves the existence of a guy, which as I've said is a neat trick in itself. It doesn't prove he was a rabbi (but why not?), it doesn't prove he was crucified (though plenty of other people were, so it's not unreasonable), and it sure doesn't prove squat about his divinity or the world being saved through his death. If you're looking for proof on the latter points, you're kind of stuck.
I'd recommend you accept the existence of the guy, and even accept that he said what the Gospels say he said. Whether what he said was right, and whether the intepretations imply what the various Christian churches wish you to believe, THAT is a topic I consider extremely unproven.
I should clarify: Raskin wants designs to encourage you to develop good habits, and to NOT let you develop habits where you shouldn't.
Clicking on a dialog box should never be a habit: either it should be something you have to think about, or you should come up with an alternative to the modality of the dialog box (for example, by making everything undoable, which does away with the "are you sure?" dialog box most of the time.)
The ActiveX dialog box is a classic example. The existence of the dialog box is not necessarily a bad thing, since it's a security decision the user needs to make that's not readily undoable. But it's far to frequent, so the user makes a habit of clicking "yes". Or a habit of clicking "no" that gets tiring, especially in the older versions where "no" means, "No, I don't want Gator this time; try asking me again in twelve seconds!"
Still, I feel you're right for many, many cases. Even in text interfaces, I write Java code differently from free text, and I like having the system know that I'm in "Java mode". I used to use different email programs for work and personal on the same computer simultaneously, partly because the differences in look and design allowed me to distinguish clearly between work-mode and personal-mode. Now I use Thunderbird for both, and I make mode mistakes by writing work email from my personal account or vice-versa.
I think the trick may be clearly distinguished modes. I'm sure not going to hold down a quasi-mode key because I'm writing Java or a work email. When you pick up a sax, not only does it feel different from a flute, but the habits you get in will be applicable for some time, until you put the instrument down.
Quasimodes are one good way to shift quickly and habitually from mode to mode, but longer-term modes will still be required. I try to minimize them; many, perhaps most, mode shifts are bad. It's just a thing to keep in mind when you're designing the interface, even if you don't entirely agree.
I was really inspired by The Humane Interface, and I've incorporated a lot of his ideas into what I do. But he doesn't need to rewrite it in Python.
I use Piccolo, from the University of Maryland's HCI lab. The Piccolo demo is nearly identical to the Shockwave demo app. Piccolo is originally in Java, but they have a.NET port as well.
I use it for viewing big graphs, almsost literally "drilling down" into them: you go "down" into the page and see more detail. It's like looking more closely at a sheet of paper. My users love it (not least because it's great eye candy), and I love it because my eyesight is less-than-perfect and I like to zoom applications to read the text more easily.
I'm sure they Python groupies will enjoy having their version of it, but it's free from the Piccolo group.
I am a big fan of The Humane Interface; I reviewed the book in its early phases.
Raskin is a big fan of buttons, as long as each button does exactly one thing. He says that the best way to use a computer is to develop habits, so that you can do things without thinking about them.
That works best when things are incredibly consistent. Modes are the enemy of habits; you have to remember that in this context the right button does X, but in that content the right button does Y.
He goes for something he calls "quasimodes", where you press and hold a button to temporarily and actively shift into a different mode. You only have one mouse to do a lot of gestures, but you want to press and hold a "zoom in" button rather than clicking into a "zoom in" mode and then clicking out.
The theory is good, but I was never completely comfortable with the idea. It seems to create rather a proliferation of buttons, and new applications can't add new buttons to your keyboard. His ideas are heavily centered around everything being a word processor or spreadsheet, and I have a hard time adapting his ideas to applications that are basically forms instead. Those cases are heavily modal: typing in one field means something very different from typing in another field.
That matches my experience. The RAM price struck me as particularly egregious: $400+ for something I can get elsewhere for $200. I was going to get a mac mini and then upgrade the RAM myself. I may still do that, but for a mere $100 premium vs. not having to open the case, I'd consider taking theirs. (I'm a programmer, not a hardware weenie, and I'm always a little paranoid to be in there mucking around with expensive and fragile components that I don't really understand.)
I'm not sure they care about whether or not you're engaging in NTP. I suspect that they just got tired of carrying the vast quantities of traffic and disk space required to participate fully in Usenet, especially if it's not an important feature for their users, and so much of the traffic is spam. I doubt many AOLers are going to dump the service just because they no longer carry alt.bitterness or comp.lang.java.announce.
If they care at all it's because of the many porn binaries newsgroups. I'm a bit surprised AOL doesn't just decide to drop them instead of all of them; there is at least some reasonable conversation remaining in the text-only newsgroups and the traffic is considerably reduced. Perhaps if they were to then block the obvious spam as well it would be much less storage (though still plenty of traffic).
I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at, but part of the answer is that you never know for certain that you've got a random sample. Or rather, you never know that you've got a representative sample unless you get everybody. Generally, randomly picked people are representative, but there's no way to guarantee it for certain.
You can put a confidence measure on the quality of your sample. The 1/sqrt(n) figure is used when you want to be 95% certain that your sample is representative at least to be within 3% (for N=1000) of the correct answer.
But you don't "randomize" the sample after you've drawn it, so you don't "rehomogenize" it.
That's not entirely true: more sophisticated sampling techniques will provide all sorts of skews trying to eliminate the biases. If you call people's homes between 9 and 5 on a weekday you know you will get people who don't have regular 9 to 5 jobs, unless they're home sick. You can try to balance the sample out by approximating the percentage of those who would be expected to be home, but it gets complicated and somewhat dubious.
So that may be what you're getting at, and the answer is that you can never be 100% certain your sample is representative. But you can be 95% certain, and that's good enough most of the time.
Basically, the trick is that when you're looking at more than a few thousand people, you can effectively treat them as infinite. Obviously you can't sample _everybody_ from an infinite number, but assuming you can sample randomly (and that's a big if), you can get a reasonably good approxiation with a fairly small sample size.
If you think about it, it doesn't seem too unreasonable. If you have an infinite sock drawer with 90% black and 10% blue socks, pull out 100 lousy socks and you'll get around 90 black and 10 blue socks. Even if you get 85 black and 15 blue, or 95 black and 5 blue, you're getting a pretty good idea of what's in the drawer.
That's from an infinite number of socks. The point is that it doesn't matter how many people there are, the quality of your sample isn't proportional to it. It's proportional to the number of people you actually sample. Generally, the formula people use is 1/sqrt(N), where N is the number of people you sample. For N=2,200, the error is only +/- 2%. Don't ask me to derive the formula; it's too hard to explain here. I'm just trying to convince you that the sample size is reasonable, as long as they're sampling randomly.
Of course, if your sample isn't random, the only way to ensure proper results is to sample _everybody_. Even interviewing half the people won't tell you squat; if all the black socks are on the left of the drawer and you pull from the right you'll think you have 100% blue socks no matter how many you sample. So the trick isn't getting a large enough sample; it's getting a random enough sample. Ensure randomness and you'll get a good picture even with only a thousand people.
Actually, the IMDB lists only one movie titled Beowulf, and it wasn't at all like the poem. There's also an animated short which sounds a lot like a project I have wanted to do for a while.
Thing is, Beowulf is famous primarily because it's the oldest example of something, not because it's a particularly good story. At its core, it's kind of a dull story: a man goes out and beats up a monster. And that's the good part; in the second half he goes out and beats up the monster's mother, and dies in the process, but it's all kind of murky. (Sorry for the spoiler, but the book has been out for twelve centuries; if you haven't read it by now it's your fault.)
In the original it's a fascinating read, from a linguistic point of view. The connections to modern English are tenuous but visible if you know where to look. The style is very different from the Greek-inspired poetry style we think of as epic poetry; the rhymes and meter are replaced by alliteration and a less strict line length with a pause in the middle.
The new translation by Seamus Heaney preserves a lot of that and gives a good taste of the original, but it's important more because of its age than because it's telling a great story. (Though I'd love to have a reading of it by James Earl Jones.)
I've actually wanted to do a Beowulf project myself, but instead of telling the story I'd read the poem aloud as narration to a nearly silent visual recreation of the story. Sort of a documentary recreation of the event, as accurate as possible in terms of costumes and set. The DVD would come with two soundtracks: the poem in English and the poem in the original, both synchronized to the visual. The actors would speak Old English when dialogue appears in the poem, with subtitles as necessary.
The IMDB lists an animated project which sounds a lot like this, with some top-name actors as voice talent (Derek Jacobi, Joseph Fiennes). Harrumph.
Well, it's not big news, the way hitting 10% would be, or when they somehow pull ahead. The same way your 37th birthday isn't nearly as interesting as your 40th.
But it's still good to know that Firefox is still making progress. Sure, it's unarguable that it's a better browser than IE. But IE still has 90% market share, and that market share is self-reinforcing: web sites will orient to it, so some people could be expected to use and abandon Firefox as incompatible with the web sites they use.
Therefore "making progress" is news.
It's news you can use. You can preach to the unconverted and tell them that it's going up, and IE is going down, and therefore they won't be marginalized if they jump to Firefox. It's also encouragement to the Firefox developers, that their efforts aren't being wasted.
Plus it gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling inside that Microsoft is getting its due, a bit, which is the best possible reason. (And yes, I'm posting this from Firefox.)
The best I get is usually splutterings along the lines of how magnificent it all is anyway, or "why bad things happen to good people"-type morality plays. Phooey.
It should be easy enough to verify. Another poster pointed out that the article is ambiguous, and perhaps they weren't in compliance after all. In which case the SLAPP-ness of this suit is even more apparent.
Re:Sick an tired of confusion over Free Speech
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Spammers Sue Spamee
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They were concerned about speech: political, commercial, social, anything. Free as in freedom: say anything you want, as long as you're not threatening somebody. The more limits you put on speech, the less free you are.
That said, there's definitely a limit to how loud you're allowed to speak, and that seems to set a precedent on spam. But the guys who designed CAN-SPAM set it up to avoid the whole problem. They were afraid that the court would throw out the baby with the bathwater if it appeared that they were restricting speech.
I find that politically rather savvy of them, even if it also played directly into the hands of the Direct Marketing Association.
According to the article, these spammers were in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act. The act isn't meant to prevent people from spamming; it's meant to make it easy to filter the spam out.
There were free-speech issues involved. The design of CAN-SPAM prevents anybody from saying that they're being censored. You're allowed to send all the spam you want; that's your free speech. Your right to free speech stops the moment it enters my server, so I drop it.
Now, I'm not sure exactly what the spammer's case is. What exactly did this guy do that was illegal? If he got the ISP to filter or refuse mail from them, as far as I can tell that's precisely in keeping with the intent of the act.
I wish more spammers would get compliant with the act, so that I can ignore them even more efficiently. And I wish that the FTC would start stringing some noncompliant spammers up by their gonads until the rest of them come into compliance.
This case has marks of a SLAPP suit. Depending on what state he lives in, there may be effective countersuits, but I'm not a lawyer. When you find out where I can pitch in to buy the guy one, let me know.
The goal of Social Security has been to say, "We guarantee that our elderly will not be left to starve." It's not the best investment in the world.
If Social Security really were pay-as-you-go, it wouldn't need investing at all: today's money is supposed to meet today's expenses. The Social Security Trust Fund had to be established to make up for the Baby Boomers having fewer children than was necessary to support themselves.
You can formulate that several different ways; having more children wouldn't necessarily put more money into SS coffers. Suffice it to say that too many people were expected to retire simultaneously.
But that money isn't invested except in Treasury debt, which is a rough analog of investing in the GDP (since taxes are roughly proportional to the GDP), and the GDP grows fairly consistently. But the tie is too inexact; better directed investment could yield better results.
The stock market is the obvious place to look, but you can't invest the SS Trust Fiund; it would totally skew the markets to have a single investor make those decisions. So, the Bush administration wants to let individuals make those decisions.
But now we return to where I started. If the individuals make the decisions, some will gamble and lose. What do we do about them? We started this in the first place as a way to make sure our elderly were cared for. It wasn't about returns; it was about care.
That leads into a whole mess of issues, but I'll spare you. But I wanted to be clear on one point: just allowing people to invest in the same safe place doesn't solve the original problem: some people starve when they get old. That is "additional risk" over the current scheme.
They can be. They should be. Two of the best Star Trek episodes of all time, Yesteday's Enterprise and City on the Edge of Forever, were time travel episodes.
They give writers and actors an opportunity to put much-beloved characters in a different environment. It gives them a chance to play "what if", like watching Superman and Batman fight.
The Holodeck could be used the same way as well, but it never worked, possibly because they started with a "the holodeck is f*ed up" episode before they used it properly.
I dunno who screwed it up; I'm sure the current fanboys have raging opinions. But as a fanboy who remembers Star Trek from... well, not the original airing but the first batch of reruns when 79 episodes were all we hand and by God we liked it that way, I don't really want to watch Berman screw it up any more. I gave up on Enterprise not because it was bad but because it was mediocre. (I gave up on Voyager because it was bad.)
Good point. I maintain a land line because many people are familiar primarily with the old number, but I've reduced service on it to as little as possible ($15). I also use it as a backup for the other devices, when things go pear-shaped.
I used to have a DSL service on a dry pair, where I didn't have any phone service on that line at all. I paid a small fee, like a buck or two a month, for that. That was pretty sweet, but they went out of business.
At least in my area, bottom-of-the-line DSL is significantly less expensive that bottom-of-the-line cable, especially if you don't already have cable. (And I don't, because I'd rather spend my time on the Internet and watching movies from Netflix. Or maybe even going outside.)
Certainly I'd appreciate more bits than my 768 connection (which usually nets me significantly less), but for basic web operations (email, browsing) it seems more than tolerable. I can even download movie trailers as long as I'm willing to be a bit patient, and I do that infrequently enough that I'm willing to be patient. If I decided that wanted to go even further down on my entertainment expenses by dumping Netflix for Bittorrent, maybe I'd want more bandwidth.
Mind you I've had reasonably terrible service from Verizon DSL, which is quite flaky, and I've heard good things about cable reliability (which seems odd, but I hear they've changed their tune since the last time I had cable in a year beginning with 19). But I find that raising both prices and bandwidth in cable doesn't lead to the price point that I want.
Whenever a new version of Word comes out, I'm always stunned that they haven't fixed basic failures like this one, in favor of more singing, dancing, flashing text. It's not intended as a desktop publishing tool, but just including a decent way to get illustrations to lay out properly in a multi-page document doesn't seem too much to ask.
Then again, I haven't had much better luck with OpenOffice. I can't help but suspect that their primary goal is Word compatability, and that costs them the flexibility to re-think certain problems to come up with a better solution.
I use OOo exclusively because while it's no better than Word, it's not really any worse, and the price is sure right.
The quizzes themselves I can live with. It's when they are accompanied by 1024-pixel-wide illustrations that make the rest of the page unreadable that I get irritated.
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If, however the (as you wrote) "best you've got" is the Josephus account, then I will recommend in kind that you raise your standards for evidence.
Your points are well taken, but the real intent was my final paragraph. If somebody were to pop up with Jesus' driver's license, it would prove... what, exactly? That there was some guy named Yeshua two thousand or so years ago. Unless it lists "Moshiach" as his occupation, I shrug (and even then it doesn't mean much except that he had the same sense of humor as I do when I use whitehouse.gov as my email address on forms I don't like.)
I'm inclined to take a generous view of the evidence simply because it ultimately doesn't point anywhere. The tricky parts of the historical account aren't with his existence but with his resurrection, his other miracles, and his position as savior. Compared to the evidence for those things, the blitherings of Joshephus and Tacticus are clues as solid as any Encyclopedia Brown could hope for.
Conclusive proof? I haven't got any. It was a long time ago and records of nearly everything were spotty. There are a lot of far more recent events which are largely conjecture. Looking for one guy two thousand years ago is going to be tricky.
However, there are various bits of reasonably contemporaneous evidence. The best one I know of is the Roman historian Josephus, who makes various passing references. He wasn't quite contemporaneous; he was born after the nominal execution of Jesus. He's not known for making stuff up, though his primary witness could have been pulling his leg. Later than that, Tacticus referred to Jesus. Do a Google search and you'll find it.
That just proves the existence of a guy, which as I've said is a neat trick in itself. It doesn't prove he was a rabbi (but why not?), it doesn't prove he was crucified (though plenty of other people were, so it's not unreasonable), and it sure doesn't prove squat about his divinity or the world being saved through his death. If you're looking for proof on the latter points, you're kind of stuck.
I'd recommend you accept the existence of the guy, and even accept that he said what the Gospels say he said. Whether what he said was right, and whether the intepretations imply what the various Christian churches wish you to believe, THAT is a topic I consider extremely unproven.
I should clarify: Raskin wants designs to encourage you to develop good habits, and to NOT let you develop habits where you shouldn't.
Clicking on a dialog box should never be a habit: either it should be something you have to think about, or you should come up with an alternative to the modality of the dialog box (for example, by making everything undoable, which does away with the "are you sure?" dialog box most of the time.)
The ActiveX dialog box is a classic example. The existence of the dialog box is not necessarily a bad thing, since it's a security decision the user needs to make that's not readily undoable. But it's far to frequent, so the user makes a habit of clicking "yes". Or a habit of clicking "no" that gets tiring, especially in the older versions where "no" means, "No, I don't want Gator this time; try asking me again in twelve seconds!"
Still, I feel you're right for many, many cases. Even in text interfaces, I write Java code differently from free text, and I like having the system know that I'm in "Java mode". I used to use different email programs for work and personal on the same computer simultaneously, partly because the differences in look and design allowed me to distinguish clearly between work-mode and personal-mode. Now I use Thunderbird for both, and I make mode mistakes by writing work email from my personal account or vice-versa.
I think the trick may be clearly distinguished modes. I'm sure not going to hold down a quasi-mode key because I'm writing Java or a work email. When you pick up a sax, not only does it feel different from a flute, but the habits you get in will be applicable for some time, until you put the instrument down.
Quasimodes are one good way to shift quickly and habitually from mode to mode, but longer-term modes will still be required. I try to minimize them; many, perhaps most, mode shifts are bad. It's just a thing to keep in mind when you're designing the interface, even if you don't entirely agree.
I was really inspired by The Humane Interface, and I've incorporated a lot of his ideas into what I do. But he doesn't need to rewrite it in Python.
.NET port as well.
I use Piccolo, from the University of Maryland's HCI lab. The Piccolo demo is nearly identical to the Shockwave demo app. Piccolo is originally in Java, but they have a
I use it for viewing big graphs, almsost literally "drilling down" into them: you go "down" into the page and see more detail. It's like looking more closely at a sheet of paper. My users love it (not least because it's great eye candy), and I love it because my eyesight is less-than-perfect and I like to zoom applications to read the text more easily.
I'm sure they Python groupies will enjoy having their version of it, but it's free from the Piccolo group.
I am a big fan of The Humane Interface; I reviewed the book in its early phases.
Raskin is a big fan of buttons, as long as each button does exactly one thing. He says that the best way to use a computer is to develop habits, so that you can do things without thinking about them.
That works best when things are incredibly consistent. Modes are the enemy of habits; you have to remember that in this context the right button does X, but in that content the right button does Y.
He goes for something he calls "quasimodes", where you press and hold a button to temporarily and actively shift into a different mode. You only have one mouse to do a lot of gestures, but you want to press and hold a "zoom in" button rather than clicking into a "zoom in" mode and then clicking out.
The theory is good, but I was never completely comfortable with the idea. It seems to create rather a proliferation of buttons, and new applications can't add new buttons to your keyboard. His ideas are heavily centered around everything being a word processor or spreadsheet, and I have a hard time adapting his ideas to applications that are basically forms instead. Those cases are heavily modal: typing in one field means something very different from typing in another field.
That matches my experience. The RAM price struck me as particularly egregious: $400+ for something I can get elsewhere for $200. I was going to get a mac mini and then upgrade the RAM myself. I may still do that, but for a mere $100 premium vs. not having to open the case, I'd consider taking theirs. (I'm a programmer, not a hardware weenie, and I'm always a little paranoid to be in there mucking around with expensive and fragile components that I don't really understand.)
I'm not sure they care about whether or not you're engaging in NTP. I suspect that they just got tired of carrying the vast quantities of traffic and disk space required to participate fully in Usenet, especially if it's not an important feature for their users, and so much of the traffic is spam. I doubt many AOLers are going to dump the service just because they no longer carry alt.bitterness or comp.lang.java.announce.
If they care at all it's because of the many porn binaries newsgroups. I'm a bit surprised AOL doesn't just decide to drop them instead of all of them; there is at least some reasonable conversation remaining in the text-only newsgroups and the traffic is considerably reduced. Perhaps if they were to then block the obvious spam as well it would be much less storage (though still plenty of traffic).
I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at, but part of the answer is that you never know for certain that you've got a random sample. Or rather, you never know that you've got a representative sample unless you get everybody. Generally, randomly picked people are representative, but there's no way to guarantee it for certain.
You can put a confidence measure on the quality of your sample. The 1/sqrt(n) figure is used when you want to be 95% certain that your sample is representative at least to be within 3% (for N=1000) of the correct answer.
But you don't "randomize" the sample after you've drawn it, so you don't "rehomogenize" it.
That's not entirely true: more sophisticated sampling techniques will provide all sorts of skews trying to eliminate the biases. If you call people's homes between 9 and 5 on a weekday you know you will get people who don't have regular 9 to 5 jobs, unless they're home sick. You can try to balance the sample out by approximating the percentage of those who would be expected to be home, but it gets complicated and somewhat dubious.
So that may be what you're getting at, and the answer is that you can never be 100% certain your sample is representative. But you can be 95% certain, and that's good enough most of the time.
Next!
Wikipedia has a good, reasonably technical article on the subject.
Basically, the trick is that when you're looking at more than a few thousand people, you can effectively treat them as infinite. Obviously you can't sample _everybody_ from an infinite number, but assuming you can sample randomly (and that's a big if), you can get a reasonably good approxiation with a fairly small sample size.
If you think about it, it doesn't seem too unreasonable. If you have an infinite sock drawer with 90% black and 10% blue socks, pull out 100 lousy socks and you'll get around 90 black and 10 blue socks. Even if you get 85 black and 15 blue, or 95 black and 5 blue, you're getting a pretty good idea of what's in the drawer.
That's from an infinite number of socks. The point is that it doesn't matter how many people there are, the quality of your sample isn't proportional to it. It's proportional to the number of people you actually sample. Generally, the formula people use is 1/sqrt(N), where N is the number of people you sample. For N=2,200, the error is only +/- 2%. Don't ask me to derive the formula; it's too hard to explain here. I'm just trying to convince you that the sample size is reasonable, as long as they're sampling randomly.
Of course, if your sample isn't random, the only way to ensure proper results is to sample _everybody_. Even interviewing half the people won't tell you squat; if all the black socks are on the left of the drawer and you pull from the right you'll think you have 100% blue socks no matter how many you sample. So the trick isn't getting a large enough sample; it's getting a random enough sample. Ensure randomness and you'll get a good picture even with only a thousand people.
And I cannot even begin to explain how much happier you are for that fact.
Yeah, right. It's been a while. Actually, not that long. Oops.
Actually, the IMDB lists only one movie titled Beowulf, and it wasn't at all like the poem. There's also an animated short which sounds a lot like a project I have wanted to do for a while.
Thing is, Beowulf is famous primarily because it's the oldest example of something, not because it's a particularly good story. At its core, it's kind of a dull story: a man goes out and beats up a monster. And that's the good part; in the second half he goes out and beats up the monster's mother, and dies in the process, but it's all kind of murky. (Sorry for the spoiler, but the book has been out for twelve centuries; if you haven't read it by now it's your fault.)
In the original it's a fascinating read, from a linguistic point of view. The connections to modern English are tenuous but visible if you know where to look. The style is very different from the Greek-inspired poetry style we think of as epic poetry; the rhymes and meter are replaced by alliteration and a less strict line length with a pause in the middle.
The new translation by Seamus Heaney preserves a lot of that and gives a good taste of the original, but it's important more because of its age than because it's telling a great story. (Though I'd love to have a reading of it by James Earl Jones.)
I've actually wanted to do a Beowulf project myself, but instead of telling the story I'd read the poem aloud as narration to a nearly silent visual recreation of the story. Sort of a documentary recreation of the event, as accurate as possible in terms of costumes and set. The DVD would come with two soundtracks: the poem in English and the poem in the original, both synchronized to the visual. The actors would speak Old English when dialogue appears in the poem, with subtitles as necessary.
The IMDB lists an animated project which sounds a lot like this, with some top-name actors as voice talent (Derek Jacobi, Joseph Fiennes). Harrumph.
Well, it's not big news, the way hitting 10% would be, or when they somehow pull ahead. The same way your 37th birthday isn't nearly as interesting as your 40th.
But it's still good to know that Firefox is still making progress. Sure, it's unarguable that it's a better browser than IE. But IE still has 90% market share, and that market share is self-reinforcing: web sites will orient to it, so some people could be expected to use and abandon Firefox as incompatible with the web sites they use.
Therefore "making progress" is news.
It's news you can use. You can preach to the unconverted and tell them that it's going up, and IE is going down, and therefore they won't be marginalized if they jump to Firefox. It's also encouragement to the Firefox developers, that their efforts aren't being wasted.
Plus it gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling inside that Microsoft is getting its due, a bit, which is the best possible reason. (And yes, I'm posting this from Firefox.)
The best I get is usually splutterings along the lines of how magnificent it all is anyway, or "why bad things happen to good people"-type morality plays. Phooey.
It should be easy enough to verify. Another poster pointed out that the article is ambiguous, and perhaps they weren't in compliance after all. In which case the SLAPP-ness of this suit is even more apparent.
They were concerned about speech: political, commercial, social, anything. Free as in freedom: say anything you want, as long as you're not threatening somebody. The more limits you put on speech, the less free you are.
That said, there's definitely a limit to how loud you're allowed to speak, and that seems to set a precedent on spam. But the guys who designed CAN-SPAM set it up to avoid the whole problem. They were afraid that the court would throw out the baby with the bathwater if it appeared that they were restricting speech.
I find that politically rather savvy of them, even if it also played directly into the hands of the Direct Marketing Association.
According to the article, these spammers were in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act. The act isn't meant to prevent people from spamming; it's meant to make it easy to filter the spam out.
There were free-speech issues involved. The design of CAN-SPAM prevents anybody from saying that they're being censored. You're allowed to send all the spam you want; that's your free speech. Your right to free speech stops the moment it enters my server, so I drop it.
Now, I'm not sure exactly what the spammer's case is. What exactly did this guy do that was illegal? If he got the ISP to filter or refuse mail from them, as far as I can tell that's precisely in keeping with the intent of the act.
I wish more spammers would get compliant with the act, so that I can ignore them even more efficiently. And I wish that the FTC would start stringing some noncompliant spammers up by their gonads until the rest of them come into compliance.
This case has marks of a SLAPP suit. Depending on what state he lives in, there may be effective countersuits, but I'm not a lawyer. When you find out where I can pitch in to buy the guy one, let me know.
The goal of Social Security has been to say, "We guarantee that our elderly will not be left to starve." It's not the best investment in the world.
If Social Security really were pay-as-you-go, it wouldn't need investing at all: today's money is supposed to meet today's expenses. The Social Security Trust Fund had to be established to make up for the Baby Boomers having fewer children than was necessary to support themselves.
You can formulate that several different ways; having more children wouldn't necessarily put more money into SS coffers. Suffice it to say that too many people were expected to retire simultaneously.
But that money isn't invested except in Treasury debt, which is a rough analog of investing in the GDP (since taxes are roughly proportional to the GDP), and the GDP grows fairly consistently. But the tie is too inexact; better directed investment could yield better results.
The stock market is the obvious place to look, but you can't invest the SS Trust Fiund; it would totally skew the markets to have a single investor make those decisions. So, the Bush administration wants to let individuals make those decisions.
But now we return to where I started. If the individuals make the decisions, some will gamble and lose. What do we do about them? We started this in the first place as a way to make sure our elderly were cared for. It wasn't about returns; it was about care.
That leads into a whole mess of issues, but I'll spare you. But I wanted to be clear on one point: just allowing people to invest in the same safe place doesn't solve the original problem: some people starve when they get old. That is "additional risk" over the current scheme.
They can be. They should be. Two of the best Star Trek episodes of all time, Yesteday's Enterprise and City on the Edge of Forever, were time travel episodes.
They give writers and actors an opportunity to put much-beloved characters in a different environment. It gives them a chance to play "what if", like watching Superman and Batman fight.
The Holodeck could be used the same way as well, but it never worked, possibly because they started with a "the holodeck is f*ed up" episode before they used it properly.
I dunno who screwed it up; I'm sure the current fanboys have raging opinions. But as a fanboy who remembers Star Trek from... well, not the original airing but the first batch of reruns when 79 episodes were all we hand and by God we liked it that way, I don't really want to watch Berman screw it up any more. I gave up on Enterprise not because it was bad but because it was mediocre. (I gave up on Voyager because it was bad.)
Good point. I maintain a land line because many people are familiar primarily with the old number, but I've reduced service on it to as little as possible ($15). I also use it as a backup for the other devices, when things go pear-shaped.
I used to have a DSL service on a dry pair, where I didn't have any phone service on that line at all. I paid a small fee, like a buck or two a month, for that. That was pretty sweet, but they went out of business.
At least in my area, bottom-of-the-line DSL is significantly less expensive that bottom-of-the-line cable, especially if you don't already have cable. (And I don't, because I'd rather spend my time on the Internet and watching movies from Netflix. Or maybe even going outside.)
Certainly I'd appreciate more bits than my 768 connection (which usually nets me significantly less), but for basic web operations (email, browsing) it seems more than tolerable. I can even download movie trailers as long as I'm willing to be a bit patient, and I do that infrequently enough that I'm willing to be patient. If I decided that wanted to go even further down on my entertainment expenses by dumping Netflix for Bittorrent, maybe I'd want more bandwidth.
Mind you I've had reasonably terrible service from Verizon DSL, which is quite flaky, and I've heard good things about cable reliability (which seems odd, but I hear they've changed their tune since the last time I had cable in a year beginning with 19). But I find that raising both prices and bandwidth in cable doesn't lead to the price point that I want.
Whenever a new version of Word comes out, I'm always stunned that they haven't fixed basic failures like this one, in favor of more singing, dancing, flashing text. It's not intended as a desktop publishing tool, but just including a decent way to get illustrations to lay out properly in a multi-page document doesn't seem too much to ask.
Then again, I haven't had much better luck with OpenOffice. I can't help but suspect that their primary goal is Word compatability, and that costs them the flexibility to re-think certain problems to come up with a better solution.
I use OOo exclusively because while it's no better than Word, it's not really any worse, and the price is sure right.
Firefox has a "remove this object" add-on that I use for the same purpose. Which is great, except when 20 friends all do it.
The quizzes themselves I can live with. It's when they are accompanied by 1024-pixel-wide illustrations that make the rest of the page unreadable that I get irritated.